Monday, February 28, 2011

Now Showing at Rostov Theater

Rostov Kino, below, is the biggest theater in the city center. See the red word that looks like POCTOB? Well, that's really Rostov, pronounced Ros-TOV in Russian. Mixing up the two alphabets can provide such entertainment. . .

Speaking of entertainment, let's get up closer and see what's showing inside. (Click photos to enlarge.)

See anything familiar?

So, on the left is I'm Fourth. And then on the right is Invasion: Battle for Paradise (or something close). I'm not seeing that at Cineplex home page, so unsure of the title (not that I'll be losing much sleep over that, mind you). But would you happen to know the title in English?

By the way, here's a fun tidbid about the Russian alphabet, or the Cyrillic alphabet, to be more precise. On the left, in the I'm Fourth poster, the letter Я, that looks like a backwards R, is actually the vowel prounounced ya. And Я (ya), the last letter of the alphabet, is also first-person, singular pronoun, that is, the I in English. Okay, you would know all that, of course. Of course! But I've heard that sometimes a Russian mother will put a child in his place by saying something like, Don't get too big for your britches, buddy boy. After all, remember that я is the last letter of the alphabet! Another interesting thing the я is not capitalized when used as the first-person pronoun. It's like writing, for instance, i find that surprising! ~ without capitalizing the I.

Meanwhile, a mile or so west of the movie theater. . .

Here is a KFC location. I need to check it out sometime. What's noteworthy here is a word on the window. It's just above the sandwich, written in gold. It's transliterated from English straight into Russian. It's meant to be pronounced longer - or at least close to it, with a Russian twist. And that's exactly what it's meant to convey. Although that's not a Russian word. Or at least, not an official word just yet.

How about you, dear blog reader? Into KFC. . . after a movie? Or have you seen either of those movies?

Oh, hello Tossing Pebbles! Do you recommend The Tourist? I'm not really much of a movie-goer, but sorta, kinda thinking about subscribing to Netflix. The movie set in Vienna sounds interesting... spent some time there in years past.